ITC Infotech employees to get bot 'buddies'

Driven by automation, ITC Infotech has undertaken a workplace transformation that could result in a culture change.

The company has chalked out a plan to equip every employee with a digital bot — a software tool that performs tasks it’s configured for. The initiative, which ITC Infotech is officially rolling out in September this year, will cover all 8,500 employees over a period of six months.

While most companies are undertaking automation and are deploying bots for specific functions catering to the workforce and customers, the difference here is that every employee at ITC Infotech will get a bot that will act like a “buddy” and execute mostly mundane tasks to meet the employee’s requirements.

Bots, said ITC Infotech, can be designed to execute a variety of actions — from complex tasks such as understanding human conversation, to simply automating repetitive tasks such as creating a pivot table in an excel sheet and pasting that on to a slide to create a presentation. The move at ITC Infotech is aimed mainly at boosting employee engagement and productivity levels.

Although the company did not disclose the total investment that will go into the entire initiative, MD & CEO Sudip Singh told TOI, “We have set the foundation for ITC Infotech to be the first technology services organisation to have developed digital personas for different roles across the organisation to drive significant productivity enhancements by automating mundane and repetitive tasks. Every employee wants to be relevant in tomorrow’s world, where creativity has a greater value. We are thus empowering our employees with bots. The objective is to make the employee happy, and a happy employee would mean a happy client.”

Milan Sheth, who is Automation Anywhere’s executive VP for India, Middle East & Africa, said although several companies have deployed bots at work, no company has set a goal of equipping 100% of their employees with bot personas. “ITC Infotech will be the first to do so. Even if all employees are not able to complete the task in six months, at least 80-85% would do so,” said Sheth, who reckons this could increase productivity levels of employees by 12-14% in the first year after full rollout.

Automation is the buzz word across sectors. In an under-development project of smart policies at Sun Life Asia Service Centre, all policies will be accessible online, searchable by key words. The chat bot will empower the database and help the employee with any query. This, said Sun Life Asia Service Centre, will be functional by December 2019.

Recently, Kotak Mahindra Bank launched an AI-powered voicebot, developed using millions of phone-banking conversations. Yes Bank, with the help of video analytics, AI and bots, develops personality reports. The app enables scheduling face-to-face/telephonic interviews, helping the bank to reach out to candidates at any place or time.

“We are convinced this is the future. The future workforce will want to perform activities that are creative. That cannot happen unless you empower them with the requisite technological tools,” said Singh. In a phased manner, help desks and kiosks have been planned across ITC Infotech’s campus in Bengaluru to help employees in leveraging the bots.